Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

This is a fair point, so we need to find some objective measure that neutralizes all the possible differences. Fortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and this “JOLTS” data includes a measure of how often workers voluntarily leave job, and we can examine this data for different parts of the workforce.

Every labor economist, right or left, will agree that higher “quit rates” are much more likely in sectors that are underpaid and lower levels are much more likely in sectors where compensation is generous.

Not surprisingly, this data shows state and local bureaucrats are living on Easy Street. As the chart illustrates, private sector workers are more than three times as likely to quit their jobs.

This helps explain why the unions are treating the Wisconsin debate as if it was Custer’s Last Stand. The bureaucrats know they have comfortable sinecures and they are fighting to preserve their unfair privileges.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video looks at all of the data and reveals a pecking order. Federal bureaucrats are at the kings and queens of compensation. State and local bureaucrats are like the nobility. And private sector taxpayers are the serfs that worker harder and earn less, but nonetheless finance the entire racket.

The video closes with a very important point that the right pay level for many bureaucrats is zero. This is because they work for programs, departments, and agencies that should not exist.

Not knowing what’s in any given person’s heart, it’s impossible to say this definitively. However, being very familiar with generally self-interested human nature, it is reasonable to be highly dubious.

Dubious about what? That striking…er, “sick” …teachers in Wisconsin, and especially their union reps, have the welfare of children foremost in mind as they skip school to protest possible crimps on union monopolies and calls for teachers to contribute more for their benefits. Yet that is what Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association President Michael Langyel would have us believe, at least if this quote from a Fox News article is accurate:

If people say the only way to solve this budget crisis is to take away from people who are working hard, they are wrong. We believe that we have a right to have a fair wage for our hard work. More importantly, the collective bargaining process allows us to positively impact school policy issues. We are the advocates for our students, and we will maintain our voice in defending our students.

Now I feel a little sick.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to get well compensated (though the portrayal of teachers as just trying to get a “fair wage” is a little rich given that on an hourly basis they make more than such professionals as accountants and insurance underwriters). But please, spare us the heroic tripe about this being about “defending” students. Teachers paying relatively little for their benefits, and even worse, allowing unions to maintain a monopoly over teachers — some of whom probably deserve to get paid much more than the union-negotiated rate — is not at all about defending students. It’s about teacher, and especially union, self-interest, pure and simple.

Earlier this month, President Obama’s HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took to the Washington Post’s op-ed page to reassure everybody that ObamaCare “puts states in the driver’s seat” and “gives states incredible freedom to tailor reforms to their needs.”

One grows weary of exposing the brazen falsehoods this administration incessantly and unconscionably peddles about its corrupt, unconstitutional, and irredeemable health care law. But here I go again: the very idea that ObamaCare puts states in the driver’s seat is nonsense. States already had the power to enact all the taxes, mandates, and price controls that ObamaCare expects them to implement — and to make what few choices ObamaCare leaves them.

If you want to know what Incredible Freedom really means, look to Wisconsin, where President Obama — who is evidently bored with the federal budget — has inserted himself into a state budget dispute, as David Boaz has noted.

As it turns out, Incredible Freedom means you are free to do exactly what President Obama wants.

The Washington Post reports on talk of federal bailouts for states (like Wisconsin) that are struggling with huge deficits and unfunded liabilities in their state pension and retiree health care programs. However:

The White House has dismissed such speculation, saying states have the wherewithal to raise taxes, cut programs and renegotiate employee contracts to balance their books.

A startling admission. Perhaps someone in the White House can pull Sebelius aside and explain that states also had the wherewithal to enact all the “reforms” that ObamaCare imposed on them. States already were “in the driver’s seat. They already had the power “to tailor reforms to their needs.”

Should Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker be commended or criticized for his proposal to change certain collective bargaining agreements for public sector employees, adding that Republicans won’t be “bullied” by protesters?

My response:

In November the government-union cabal that has driven Wisconsin, like other states, to the brink of bankruptcy was thrown out of office in a landslide election. So what are the union thugs now occupying the capitol and the state’s Democratic senators who’ve fled the state complaining about? The lack of democracy. That so many are “teachers,” waving signs likening Gov. Walker to Hitler and Stalin, gives rise only to sympathy for the children of Wisconsin.

In fact, if ever there were an argument for separating school and state, it’s unfolding today in Madison. Private schools in the state are functioning quite normally through this Athens-like spectacle, because they operate under normal market conditions, where parents, administrators, and teachers decide personnel matters through voluntary agreements. By contrast, as the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards has shown through numerous studies, because public-sector unions occupy, effectively, both sides of the bargaining table, their pay and benefits over the years have far outstripped those of private-sector workers who pay those benefits.

Well the taxpayers spoke in November. The unions’ beef is with them. Deal with it.